One of the contrasts outlined in an NDP post-mortem was the B.C. Liberals’ ability to have Liberal leader Christy Clark portrayed ‘constantly surrounded by people’ during the campaign, giving the impression that ‘she was having fun’ and ‘attractive to others.’ The NDP’s framing of Adrian Dix was quite different — here’s a photo of him with campaign manager Brian Topp, who wrote the post-mortem.

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VICTORIA — What went wrong for the New Democrats in the provincial election? Plenty, to hear Adrian Dix’s hand-picked campaign manager Brian Topp tell it.

The party’s advertising, polling, platform, strategy and tactics all came under fire from Topp and members of his team in a post-mortem delivered to selected party brass back in June and revised later in the summer.

Happily, a draft was leaked to The Vancouver Sun this week, for it is as insightful as it is entertaining to read — the Topp method being to highlight NDP failures via what sounds like grudging praise for the Liberals.

Here, for instance, is the take on the respective party backrooms:

“The Liberal war room excelled in uncovering and bringing to light the mistakes, some serious, that some of our candidates had made in their private lives. We did not reply in kind in keeping with our explicit and oft-repeated commitment to avoid personal attacks during the campaign. So the gay-bashers, bankrupts, tax avoiders, drug trade associates and people who indulged in sundry ethical lapses in government who ran for office on the Liberal slate got a largely free ride from us.”

The brief further accuses the Liberals of sabotaging the B.C. Conservatives by infiltrating their ranks, then denouncing party leader John Cummins. There’s also a suggestion that other Liberal operatives flirted with law-breaking:

“A team was hived off from the premier’s office and set to work organizing an (arguably illegal) front group to anonymously fundraise and then broadcast a series of (arguably defamatory) attack ads aimed at Adrian Dix.”

But it would be wrong to assume the brief rationalizes a stolen election. Mostly it is an account of a battle plan that, however well-intentioned, “did not survive contact with our opponent, who was playing from a very different playbook on every point.”

Topp and crew don’t spare themselves: “A political disappointment like this is a team effort.” But in light of Adrian Dix’s announcement that he will step down as party leader, one should highlight why he deserves a large share of the blame for the NDP defeat.

His improvised reversal of position on the proposed twinning of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, undertaken without advance notice to his own candidates, was singularly damaging to the campaign.

“Within three days, under withering fire in the media, our tracking registered the largest drop in our support we would see,” says the brief. “Many analysts have since argued, fairly persuasively in our view, that this was the decisive moment of the campaign.”

Here’s why: “It gave the Liberals an opening to turn our apparent inconsistency into a character issue about our leader ... and it simultaneously allowed them to build on their argument that changing the government was too economically risky — their core case for re-election.”

Dix’s judgment comes under further scrutiny over his insistence that the party run a strictly positive campaign. Topp and crew suggest a selfish element was at play:

“We speculate that Mr. Dix believed this approach could work both as a general proposition, and as a strategy to deal with the obvious coming Liberal personal attack on his record.”

The latter being a reference to the notorious memo to file Dix fabricated in a casino-licensing scandal back in the 1990s. The implication being that he went positive to inoculate himself against attack over his own past misdeeds.

Much of the brief is given over to explaining how the Dix-led decision to accentuate the positive limited the party’s options when the campaign tightened up near the end.

“We considered pivoting the campaign and turning directly to an attack on Christy Clark ... reversing field completely, going straight negative, and turning it into a referendum about the premier. “

But the New Democrats had already field-tested that strategy and determined it would likely backfire and trigger a meltdown of their support. ”When we went after Ms. Clark directly on our phone banks, respondents immediately challenged us for “flip-flopping” on our positive campaign. And then they repeated the Liberals’ attack ad scripts about Adrian Dix back to us ... When we directly attacked the Liberal leader, respondents defended her by raising the Liberal lines about our own leader.”

Hands tied by their own irreversible strategy, fooled by their own polling into believing they were well ahead, Topp and team contented themselves with a $1.5-million blitz of ads and touring that — as they discovered on election night — proved to be “too little, too late.”

The brief closes with a discussion of the need to be more focused, disciplined, contrasting, defence-minded, alert, engaging, and visual, illustrated with snapshots from campaign 2013 like the following:

“Christy Clark’s constant appearance in a hard-hat and safety vest was the visual equivalent of her message discipline. She was constantly surrounded by people, especially children, seniors, and members of ethno-cultural communities. Such images led the viewer to believe she was having fun, attractive to others and that her campaign had energy and momentum ... Too often our leader was photographed alone, or with staff, either in scrums, coming off the bus, or walking to and from campaign events.”

The point being that the New Democrats should get it right next time. But as a tribute to Christy Clark and her campaign, I doubt the Liberal publicity apparatus could have crafted a better text.

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